Association rules are rules that define relationships between items in sales databases. They have been used primarily to organize relevant products in stores in a way to makes them more visible to consumers, which may increase sales and profits. On the other hand, it has been rarely used in recommender systems where algorithms provide instant recommendations by processing consumers’ interests that are gathered when browsing online. However, the vast amount of information collected from transaction data saved on backup servers is poorly taken advantage of, because it is not connected to the Internet, although interesting and personalized recommendations can be created after finding the collections of most frequent items, or most interesting rules in such databases. In this paper, we do a critique of the existing research on both recommender systems along with showing their drawbacks, and the association rules with detailed explanations on their advantages. Finally, draw up with several solutions for producing high quality as well as accurate recommendations by applying novel combinations of techniques observed in this research area including the association-rules-based recommender systems.