Everyone knows by now that Amazon is evil – except Amazon itself, it seems. That's why I took the fight directly to amazon.co.uk, creating a fake book for sale called Living Wages for Amazon Workers.

We wanted to make our campaign unavoidable for Amazon, and we succeeded: the product was live for just over two hours, until Amazon pulled it – but not before it had racked up hundreds of reviews supporting our demand.

"£7.65 seems such a reasonable price for giving a modicum of security and dignity to a workforce," said one reviewer. "At last!" cried another, "a way for Amazon to avoid all that embarrassing publicity about poverty-level pay ... perhaps you can get your accountant to update your tax payments at the same time."

And, hitting the nail on the head: "What price dignity and self-respect? Just £7.65 an hour!" Other activists have since set up similar products, turning the online shopping mall into an obstacle course for a company that normally seems immune to criticism.

So far Amazon has ignored nearly 70,000 people who have called on it to pay living wages via the online petition I set up back in December. The petition highlighted the human cost of Amazon's warehouse operations, including the insecurity of zero-hours contracts, the indignity of friskings and timed toilet breaks, and alleged warnings to workers against joining unions. Paying a living wage wouldn't solve all of this, but it would ease the daily reality of the Amazon "elves".

After the petition went viral, I received a tepid response from Amazon, which avoided addressing living-wage rates or the plight of its many thousands of temporary workers. But I received an altogether warmer response from angry ex-Amazon customers, and major NGOs that wanted to get in on the anti-Amazon act. Amazon Anonymous was born, a loose collective of everyone from tax justice campaigners to the publishing industry, which objects to being Jeff Bezos's "sickly gazelle" to be hunted down and killed off.

Customer satisfaction is the Amazon chief executive's mantra. Bezos opens the 2013 annual report by saying: "I'm so proud of what all the teams here at Amazon have accomplished on behalf of customers this past year." But Bezos seems blind to the fact that customers are also citizens and neighbours, and the human reality of the Amazon warehouse is not something many customers want perpetrated on their behalf. Increasing numbers of people understand that every order fulfilled and delivered at warp speed is the product of a warehouse system that epitomises "McDonaldisation". The sociologist George Ritzer coined the term to describe contemporary business operations that deny the basic humanity of the workforce in the name of calculability, efficiency and … customer satisfaction.

But Bezos might want to learn from the namesake of this system; McDonald's sales have been rocky over the past few years; Amazon may not yet be on its uppers, but the flurry of angry reviews clocked up by our Living Wages stunt tells the story of its future. To review a product, you have to be a prior Amazon customer. This means that each and every one of these reviews comes from consumers that Amazon is losing. They are choosing to spend their hard-earned cash elsewhere and to avoid contributing to a company that has forgotten the importance of having a social licence to operate.

It'll take a lot more than an online stunt to break Amazon – and we're ready with more innovative and effective actions to come. As Amazon continues to ignore criticism and complaints, it thinks it's winning the war through silence. Instead, its sheer disdain for the UK's workforce, our tax coffers and our publishing industry will prove its own worst enemy, helping us to forge a powerful coalition against it.