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It's not the size of your purse that reveals your shopping habits, but the size of your bra, according to new research.

Ladies with a cup size of B or smaller tend to save their pennies, while more endowed women are more likely to splurge on luxury items, claims e-commerce group Alibaba.

The Chinese group compared underwear sales on their site to the total amount spent and placed customers into five categories: low, slightly low, middle, slightly high, and high.

Ladies with a cup size of B or smaller tend to save their pennies, while more endowed women are splurge on luxury items, claims e-commerce group Alibaba

The data revealed only seven per cent of B-sized women buy in either of the 'high spending' categories.

Around 17 per cent of C-sized are high spenders, D-sized women are at 24 per cent, and E-sized women are at 33 per cent.

Overall, Alibaba found 65 per cent of women with a B-size cup fell into the 'low' spend category, while those of a size C or higher can be found mostly into the 'middle' or higher group.

One reason for this may be that younger women with less disposable income are the ones buying smaller bras, according to Quartz.

ALIBABA'S FOUNDER: FROM KFC REJECT TO WORLD'S 70TH RICHEST MAN

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, has made it into the world's 100 richest men

After his company's record-breaking entry into the U.S. stock market in November, Alibaba founder Jack Ma has made it into the world's 100 richest men.

But before his stratospheric rise to wealth and power at the head of his company, an internet giant which dominates the Chinese online economy, Ma couldn't even make it into a chicken shop.

The 50-year-old entrepreneur who founded Alibaba with a group of 17 friends in 1999, had humble roots in the city of Hangzhou, eastern China, where he taught English in a local school.

But, hoping to better his lot in the early 1990s he applied, and was turned down for, a slew of other jobs, including with a KFC in the city.

Ma's luck changed, however, when a job came up in 1995 which let him travel to the United States as a translator, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

While there he caught his first sight of a computer linked to the internet - which began a chain of events which would lead to him joining the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in the ranks of those made fabulously wealthy by new technology. 

Today, Alibaba's value is just shy of £147 billion ($230 billion), putting it just above Procter and Gamble on the NYSE, and just below JP Morgan Chase. 

The high cost of speciality bras for well-endowed women may also have skewed the results.

'We've only seen the tip of the iceberg,' Alibaba Vice President Joseph Tsai told Quartz of the company's data-dive.

'We really haven't done even five per cent of leveraging that data to really make our operations more efficient, consumers more satisfied.'

The data revealed only seven per cent of B-sized women buy in either of the 'high spending' categories

Singles Day, on November 11, triggered online sales totalling £6 billion ($9.3 billion) and revealed the data mining strength of the company.

Alibaba turned Singles' Day into an online shopping festival in 2009. It copyrighted the 'Double 11' term three years later after recognising its commercial potential.

'You're seeing the unleashing of the consumption power of the Chinese consumer,' Joe Tsai, Alibaba's executive vice chairman, said.

Alibaba's founder Jack Ma claims that data mining is one of the company's priorities, a last year set up an 800-strong group of employees dedicated to analysing shopper statistics.